Commodore 64 Longplay [032] Metal Dust (EU)

http://www.longplays.org

Played by: MadMatty

Metal Dust, developed by Stefan Gutsch and Chester Kollschen and published by Protovision in 2005.

“Thousands of enemies, four big worlds, two armed ships and the only goal … VICTORY!”

This is the one and only commercial game released for a SuperCPU accelerated Commodore 64. The number of users still using a C64 in 2005 would have been few and the number of those owning the CMD SuperCPU accelerator would have been even less making the game a tough sell right from the start. The game can still be bought at the Protovision website in a digital format suitable for use in emulators which is the only sensible way to play it today as buying a SuperCPU today could cost 4 figures!.

Metal dust is a shoot em up that can be played in 1 or two players. There are multiple difficulty levels with the notable effect of deciding how many lives you start with. Graphically, the game is heavily influenced by the style of Manfred Trenz known for titles such as Turrican, Katakis and R-Type. You control your craft as expected, shooting at any enemies on screen with a number of different weapons which you can collect throughout the game. Weapon power ups are thrown at you all the time so you are never without your favourite weapon combo. You also get a megablast which you need to charge by holding the fire button, but be careful as the resulting shot can easily throw your ship back into the scenery ending you! There are 4 long and treacherous levels to play through with each have mid level and end bosses to contend with.

Overall the game is well presented with a couple of long music pieces at the start. Loading images precede each level and there is a long outro at the end. An intro explaining a little of the backstory would have been welcome, but that's a minor gripe ...really.

While I am not sure what the SuperCPU is doing gameplay wise ( compared against other great shoot em ups like enforcer from Manfred Trenz), it is doing most of the work of playing back the digitised audio stream that gets preloaded into the 4 megs of ram provided by the SuperCPU. This allows a great soundtrack with speech samples without disrupting the games sound effects. It no doubt helps with the animated parallax scrolling and huge number of enemies on screen.

My main gripe with the longplay is the sound for the boss fights. It sounds very over amplified. I can't tell you if that happens on a real C64 or is the fault of the Vice 3.3 8580 Sid Emulation. This version of the Vice SuperCPU emu doesn't really give you much control over the sound. The game is large being on 4 800k disks requiring a 1581 drive. I have cut out a lot of the loading time which would would have easily seen this video an hour long if left in.

And now for the time stamps. Sure to upset someone with having 10+mins of music play out at the start of the video but when you are trying to archive a game in its entirety, that's how we roll.

00:00:00 Protovision intro Music
00:04:15 Metal Dust Title Music
00:11:30 Level 1
00:17:35 Level 2
00:24:45 Level 3
00:31:00 Level 4
00:40:40 Ending
00:46:00 Credits
00:50:52 Highscore / Game Over -
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